Hello,
I’m trying to set midi controls for my sherman filterbank with my digitakt. So far, I could get control of every parameters, however the cutoff freq of the filter 1 is controlled by the pitch bend of the digitakt, which goes from -127 to 127.
The midi range of the sherman is supposed to go to a value of 8192 (0 corresponding to -127 on DT, 4096 corresponding to 0 on DT and 8192 corresponding to 127).
Do you know if it’s possible to change the midi range on the digitakt? Actually, I have a very small range on this parameter.
All the other controls have compatible resolution with the digitakt (except that for the resonnance frequency of the filters, the maximum range of the potentiometer is reached at a value of 63).
Don’t know if I’m clear enough, kinda hard for me to understand/explain this
This link seems like it might be useful to you, I just skimmed over the information so I can’t really give you a concise synopsis, but one thing that stands out to me is that it said pitch bend has a different bit resolution than midi cc, there’s also some further info on the midi implementation so it’s at least worth taking a look.
So most midi is 7 bit, so has a range of 0 - 127, but pitchbend is 14 bit, so it has a range of 0 to 16,383.
I’ve no idea why the PB on the Digitakt goes from -128 to 128, but if I was to hazard a guess I’d say it’s probably a UI thing so people don’t get confused by one knob being over 16000 values when all the others are 0-127. I imagine that behind the UI, the Digitakt is sending the correct 14 bit PB data that the FB is looking for.
Pitch bend values -or any 14-bit value- is sent as a pair of 7-bit values(MSB and LSB). A lot of midi devices with pitch bend don’t have the control precision for 14 bits so the value gets quantized.
Depending on the control precision you can quantize to anything from 7 to 14 bits by simply skipping LSB values. If you just leave LSB at 0 you’re back at 7 bits.
Since the 14-bit value is MSB*128 + LSB, you’ll end up with a range of 0-16256 which is almost the full range of 0-16383. There are different ways to deal with that last missing bit, but the range of a pitch bend control should be always the same no matter the precision.
The Digitakt however, does send the full 14-bit range. The translation to the screen is a little weird because it doesn’t represent anything related to the actual midi value.
But if you do the math you’ll notice that the full 14-bit precision is all there because of the 2 decimals displayed. But because of the weird conversion, some decimal values are skipped.
It would be nice if you could shed some light on your MIDI implementation and use case scenario.
I use Sherman with DT often and have explored the potential of automations, but recently prefer just to send trig data via MIDI to the device and tweak parameters with Sherman’s own knobs.
Thanks for the answers.
Effectively I thought, the pitch bend was only sending 7 bit values since I couldn’t get the full range of the potentiometer, but if I set the potentiometer halfway, -127 on the screen set the pot to 0 and +127 set it to 10. Not very convenient, since the potentiometer has no mid point.
My goal using midi controls for the sherman, was for playing live and having less potentiometers to set on the FB on every track. I did not explore the trig data via MIDI, neither the automations.
